Living with wildfire cultivating a stewardship framework

Place-based stewardship in mountain watersheds can play an important role in responding to and helping to mitigate different kinds of landscape-based hazards, including wildfire and post-fire flooding. In a world with more extreme wildfire, what does it mean to live with fire, where the impacts affect people and places across jurisdictions for many years after the fire itself? Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation and interviews, I explore this question in the particular geographic and land use context of the Poudre Canyon in northern Colorado. Local stewardship practices in mountain communities can benefit populations beyond the fire perimeter. These may be rooted in ongoing relationships to the land, local, volunteer-based hazard mitigation and emergency response, and post-fire collaborative efforts. Using narrative analysis, I examine how landscapes at risk of fire are defined, how wildfire risk is communicated to those living in these landscapes in Colorado, and how discourses of risk and responsibility facilitate or constrain adaptation to living with extreme fire. I encourage an approach to risk communication that conceptualizes those who live in fire adapted landscapes as potential stewards. I also suggest that wildfire risk reduction efforts should be more geographically and socially expansive, to acknowledge that contending with wildfire and its associated hazards of smoke and flooding is a society-wide challenge, not just for those living in fire adapted landscapes. Living with fire is a process, and community members, practitioners, and scientists alike are reorienting toward a world with more extreme wildfire.